Nate Johansen

History 1700
Tue & Thur.
10:00 AM

The Cotton Gin

As we look back in history we learn that Cotton played a huge
role and was a major aspect in the growing of the American Economy
in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. It also had a huge impact on
the amount of slavery that went on at the time, which created
disagreements between the North and South and contributed to the
beginning of the Civil War. Cotton was most certainly one of Americas
great booms, specifically the south. Cotton was grown in the South
because of its thick, dark soil. With the soil being soft and with the area
of navigable rivers made this area ideal. Settlers in the south quickly
discovered the soil was very fertile and great for cotton planting.
Cotton completely dominated the economy in the south and began to
take over the growing of tobacco. Tobacco took quite the toll on the
land, and farmers would have to rotate their land. Cotton on the other
hand requires very little to grow and people were able to grow cotton
almost anywhere. Cotton however wasnt always considered a cash
crop. Before the cotton gin was invented, cotton was such a
troublesome crop. Its fibers could only be separated from the sticky,
embedded seeds by hand, which was a very long, grueling and

exhausting process. It would take slaves hours and hours to pick seeds
out of a boll of cotton and it wasnt efficient at all.
There was a man by the name of Eli Whitney who would impact
and change history forever. He was born in Westborough,
Massachusetts. He was born on December 8. 1765. Whitney worked as
a farmer and as a school teacher to save up money so that he could go
to school. He always has a special ability with machine work and
technology. He became an expert at making nails from a device he
invented. He ended up attending Yale University and graduating in
1792. He was planning on studying law and becoming a lawyer. Shortly
after graduating he was hired to be a tutor in South Carolina. As
Whitney was sailing on his way to South Carolina he met a lady by the
name of Catherine Greene. Whitney ended up refusing the tutoring job
and instead accepted an offer to work at Catherine Greens Mulberry
Grove plantation in Georgia.
Once Whitney was in Georgia he quickly discovered that
southern planters were in a desperate need of a way to make the
growing of cotton profitable. Long-staple cotton, which was easy to
separate from its seeds, could only be grown along the coast. The type
of cotton that grew inland had sticky green seeds that were very timeconsuming to pick out. Catherine Greene encouraged Whitney to find a
solution to this problem. This was a critical time because they really

needed success in the South with planting cotton because tobacco was
declining in profit.
Eli decides to set aside his plans to study law and instead try and
put together some machine that would solve this problem. With the
help of Greene, both morally and financially Whitney spent a winter
and spring in this little workshop and within a few months had created
the cotton gin. Its name is cotton gin because gin is simply short for
engine. It was a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton
fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity from
what they had been doing, which is manually separating the seeds
from the cotton.
The gin itself comprised of a rotating drum with wire hooks or
retched-like teeth that pulled cotton fibers between the teeth of a
comb. The comb had teeth spaced too closely for seeds to pass
through. A second drum would rotate faster than the first and carry
brushes, serving to dislodge the cotton fibers from the first. This was
driven, along with the larger drum, by a belt-and-pulley arrangement
typically having a four-to-one ratio. Cotton bolls were then loaded into
a hopper, which would guild them to the face of the comb. After being
pulled through by the toothed cylinder, the separated cotton fibers
emerged at the left and the seeds collected to the right.
Now instead of the laborers to clean just one pound of cotton per
day, workers could now clean 50 pounds of cotton per day, per worker.

Elis invention was very simple that its almost surprising no one had
invented something like it before. A small gin could be hand-cranked
and larger versions could be driven by water power or even harnesses
and powered by a horse. Whitney thought he was going to be rich off
of it, even saying to his father Tis generally said by those who know
anything about it, that I shall make a fortune by it.
Whitney knew that he could apply to the federal government for
a patent, but making a patent and making a profit from it are two
different things. Whitney and his business partner Phineas Miller, opted
to produce as many gins as possible through the South, and charge
famers two-fifths of the profit to use these gins. Farmers were not
happy about that and began just creating their own versions of
Whitneys gin and claiming they were new inventions. Their design
was almost immediately stolen and counterfeited a vast number of
times. Whitney spent years in legal battles, the and Miller brought
costly suits against the owners of these pirated versions but because
of a loophole in the wording of the 1793 patent act, they were unable
to win any suits until 1800, when the law was then changed. Overall
Whitney made almost no net profit. The partners, Whitney and Miller
agreed to license gins at a reasonable price. This is disappointing,
because Whitney deserves all the credit or the Cotton Gin and he was
given so little.

Suddenly cotton became a lucrative crop and a major export for

the South. The yield of cotton doubled each decade after 1800.
Around 1812 the U.S. produced less then 300,000 bales of cotton. By
1820, this had increased to 600,00 and by 1850 it had reached
4,000,000. At one point cotton accounted for almost 60% of American
exports, representing a total value of nearly $300 million a year, which
is the equivalent of $6.8 billion in todays currency. Well who was going
to buy all this cotton? In the late 1700s, the British textile industry
started and created a huge demand for cotton. The south sold their
cotton to England instead of making factories and producing textiles
themselves. Southern plantations are the ones that generated threefourths of the worlds cotton supply to fuel Englands textile industry as
well emerging textile industry in the northern United States. Native
Americans were pushed out of the land to make room for more cotton
farms. Farmers that would normally grow food would start growing
cotton because it was more lucrative. The South became completely
dependent on the price of cotton. When cotton was being sold at a
good price, farmers would rush to grow cotton and then they would
flood the market, which made the price for cotton drop quite
drastically. More people were needed to harvest all the cotton, and
slaves were used for this task.
Like so many other inventors, Whitney could not have foreseen
the ways his invention would change society for the worse, he was

simply just trying to solve the problem they were facing trying to
become more efficient with the Cotton Crop. The most significant thing
that resulted from the cotton gin was the expediential growth of
slavery. The cotton gin did indeed reduce the labor of removing seeds
by hand, but it didnt reduce but rather increase the need for slaves to
grow and pick cotton. Cotton growing became so profitable for planters
that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor.
Cotton is called white gold and the slavery that supports it, is a big,
billion-dollar business. Whitney would go on to invent how to
manufacture muskets by machine so that the parts were
interchangeable. It was as a manufacturer of muskets that Whitney
finally became rich. Whitney died in 1825, only seeing a fraction of how
history has changed from his simple invention, and he, to this day is
best remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin.
The US governments support of slavery was based on an
overpowering practicality. In 1790, a thousand tons of cotton was being
produced every year in the South. By 1860, it was a million tons. In the
same period, 500,000 slaves grew to 4 million. Howard Zinn once said
this.
Slaves now labored on larger plantations where work was even
more demanding and relentless. Large plantations began to spread all
across the southwest. As the need for slaves increased, this caused
more disagreements between the North and the South. Because the

need for slaves increases, so did the value of slaves. In 1790 there
were six slave states, in 1860 there were 15. By 1860 approximately
one in three Southerners were a slave. Some people might disagree
but when it comes down to it, slavery is really what caused the Civil
War.